Đà Nẵng Community Radio

I know when I see something special, and what I saw here was people making music for the love. They made their money playing the beach clubs, where they had to play a certain thing, and then on the weekends they did their real passion. There were a lot of them, and everybody was working together.

I'd been coming here for six years, a month at a time, and I moved here two years ago. I'd started Cambodia Community Radio, I was part of underground music Thailand during COVID, and I have a background in radio and media production. I've always loved radio as a form of anti-algorithm, anti-programming. It's a way to get people's voices out there purely, without being filtered. People sinking money and time into something with no way of knowing whether anybody's listening, just because they love it and want to share music.

Those are the people we need in positions of curation and bookings. There are too many places run by middle managers who don't know anything about music, just trying to please their customers. The secret of the arts is that nobody knows what they like until they hear it. You can't just give people what they want, that ends up being a race to the bottom.

At its core is a basic assumption: the arts are best served by the people who would be doing it even if they weren't being paid. If you look at the lineup, none of these people are a draw in the usual sense. You'd sell more tickets booking a local with ten friends than a radio founder from Hong Kong. And yet people listen to these DJs and respect the art of DJing. That disconnect is the question, and this is the answer I'm going to try.

I wanted to put all these radio stations together and let them show off their best. I don't live in Hong Kong or Mongolia or Singapore, but I know who to trust there: the founders of these stations, who deal with bookings all the time and know who's cutting edge in their city. So I told them, I'll fly you out, I'll put you up, you don't worry about a thing. You provide the thing you're good at, which is your curation, and I'll take care of the rest.

It's not for profit, really. It's for supercharging a scene that's nascent and at a very crucial moment. I think people are really looking to the East now, and I don't think there's any way forward besides the community-based way.

First and foremost, I love Đà Nẵng. It has everything we could want, except, for now, a world-class music scene. It's almost a blank slate as far as the arts go. There's no concrete identity where people say, that's not what we do here. People can experiment.

So the conference is also a guided tour of the best of Đà Nẵng and Hội An, some of our best venues, some of the best food, with the added spice of bringing together some of the most listened-to underground curators in Asia and showing them this is a special place, open to new sounds. The clubs here are small, fifty or sixty capacity, which makes the perfect backdrop for pavilions where different radio stations curate their own night.

And everyone has been supportive. Every single venue. That's what I love about central Vietnam: people are optimistic and hopeful, there's not a lot of ego, and everyone has a stake in this scene rising together. We don't have to compete right now. This is our time to shine.

Sustainability, and respect for the people doing it for love. There's enough out there, enough benefit, enough chance to make this sustainable and to put those people in positions of curating more than they already are.

That's what the conference weekend is really for. A community radio that's been doing it for ten years can teach one that's been going two. How do we make the thing we love sustainable, how do we put our heads together, how do we almost unionise as a creative class and say: we have something special here, people should respect it and reward it. I started Đà Nẵng Community Radio for the same reason, to give people here a sense of pride in their scene. I've watched scenes go the wrong direction in other places, where it all turns mainstream and nobody takes chances. Artists thrive on sharing, and if you get no feedback it grates on you.

So for the first six months I recorded every set myself on the roof. Then I started going into the venues to record what it feels like to be there for a night. Radio now is an audio-visual platform, so I joke that I'm making tourism videos. Slice of life. Showing that we have something special here too. It's not just Bangkok, not just Shanghai, not just Tokyo.

As a curator, the collisions. Linh Ku, a legendary Vinahouse producer, and Doc Matthews, the founder of Detroit Techno Militia, are playing a morning coffee rave together, ten in the morning like it's peak time, Friday the 14th at Idle Place. Neither of them has ever done anything like it, and I think people will hear new things in both genres. The real beauty is going to be in between the notes.

There are local artists opening for each radio station at each venue, and the pavilions have their own stories. Kong 72 is run by a couple from Hong Kong, so Hong Kong Community Radio plays there. Gatosano was started by a Japanese guy and handed to a Vietnamese crew, and now Room 303 Radio from Shinjuku brings it full circle with uncompromising Japanese underground artists.

And the food is part of it. A Michelin-starred chef from Westwood Đà Nẵng is doing a barbecue on the beach on Friday night. And in Hội An, at Roving Chillhouse on the Saturday, we've worked closely with the venue on a traditional Hội An and Quảng Nam style dinner for everyone, in the middle of the rice fields, after the talks.

Myro and I are aligned on ninety-nine percent of the vision. I've had almost identical ideas to what he's doing, or he's already done it, and he shows me my ideas at a bigger scale and better quality. I was an entrepreneur for years and stopped, but I kept the skills: logistics, design, business relations. So I'm helping with all of that.

In the back of everything, I'm doing something I believe in without caring about the outcome, and I feel like that is art itself. You don't need to be a musician or a painter to create something. This whole experience of Airtime Asia is the process of making something happen. The work is already the art. And working with Myro is so much fun. I feel like I found a brother I never had.

The full pass is everything, about twenty-three events across the four days. That's on tier two now, and it'll stay up until the night before. We're launching individual tickets for the Friday night circuit, seven venues on one ticket for one night, and a one-off ticket for the Saturday night finale, three rooms, everybody together. For Vietnamese citizens there's a special supporter price, because we want people to know these venues, these artists, and these conversations. And we're not turning people away at individual venues either. We want to share this as much as possible.

We need volunteers, please let people know. And Đà Nẵng Community Radio is opening up: the community part, it's time. Anybody in Đà Nẵng recording their own sets can submit them for the platform. It has to be a certain quality, the sound has to be correct, but if you're capable, we want to put you on. This was never a moneymaker. It's been incubated enough, and now it's really time for people to own their scene.

And at the festival itself we're launching an Airtime Asia record pool, a not-for-profit platform that takes away the middleman between young Asian producers and the people who should hear them. To us the right people are the radio DJs, the ones breaking new music. Upload your music and it's guaranteed to be heard by them, and they can distribute it to their stations for airplay all around Asia.

Beyond that, just come with an open mind. Sound is one of the most powerful tools we have to change people. Putting people together on a dance floor who don't know each other, and are sometimes told to hate each other, those encounters in a transcendent experience push humanity forward. We just want to do our small part to make more of those.